The Jungle eBook

was a fine chance to see the sights of the city, and
the party had a merry time, with plenty of beer handed
up from inside. So they drove downtown and stopped
before an imposing granite building, in which they
interviewed an official, who had the papers all ready,
with only the names to be filled in. So each
man in turn took an oath of which he did not understand
a word, and then was presented with a handsome ornamented
document with a big red seal and the shield of the
United States upon it, and was told that he had become
a citizen of the Republic and the equal of the President
himself.

A month or two later Jurgis had another interview
with this same man, who told him where to go to “register.”
And then finally, when election day came, the packing
houses posted a notice that men who desired to vote
might remain away until nine that morning, and the
same night watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his
flock into the back room of a saloon, and showed each
of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then gave
each two dollars, and took them to the polling place,
where there was a policeman on duty especially to
see that they got through all right. Jurgis felt
quite proud of this good luck till he got home and
met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered
to him, offering to vote three times for four dollars,
which offer had been accepted.

And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained
all this mystery to him; and he learned that America
differed from Russia in that its government existed
under the form of a democracy. The officials who
ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected
first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters,
known as political parties, and the one got the office
which bought the most votes. Now and then, the
election was very close, and that was the time the
poor man came in. In the stockyards this was
only in national and state elections, for in local
elections the Democratic Party always carried everything.
The ruler of the district was therefore the Democratic
boss, a little Irishman named Mike Scully. Scully
held an important party office in the state, and bossed
even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his
boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket.
He was an enormously rich man—­he had a
hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood.
It was Scully, for instance, who owned that dump which
Jurgis and Ona had seen the first day of their arrival.
Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the brick
factory as well, and first he took out the clay and
made it into bricks, and then he had the city bring
garbage to fill up the hole, so that he could build
houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold
the bricks to the city, at his own price, and the
city came and got them in its own wagons. And
also he owned the other hole near by, where the stagnant
water was; and it was he who cut the ice and sold it;
and what was more, if the men told truth, he had not